Ebony Touching
by PallaPlease
Summary: [SPOILERS]  A bed-fic, wherein Rei and Kira laugh and share secrets, sinking even further into the balance of their relationship.  Post-series.  Comments welcomed.  [Finished]


Notes:  A relatively short, marginally plotless bed-fic.  Without the described sex, of course, so you can rest your dejected head now.  I'm saving that for my vampire fic.  ^.-

Warning! This fanfic has mild spoilers for the ending of MARS, so if you're following the Tokyopop publication, you might want to skip this. Your own discretion and all.

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Ebony Touching

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She verged on the edge of sleeping, eyelids made heavy with a content drowsiness and arms draping as slender lengths of dark ivory across his shoulders, her cheek pressing angelically into the pillow.  The night air was strong enough in their small room to dry the faint sheen of sweat that stuck to her skin, giving her a pale look and soothing the redness in her cheeks.  He loved how the culmination of things changed her – blushing from caresses, paleness from waiting after, glittering from the silver droplets of salt-water she bled – and was content himself to watch her.

God, he thought, nestling his own cheek in the softness of their communal pillow, the other knocked somewhere on the floor after his hasty determination to get any obstacles off the bed and fast.  It amazed him, still, to know he had the ability – the privilege – to rise in the morning wrapped around her or simply stare at her as she hovered between sleep and waking as he did now.  He touched the rough curve of his thumb to her lower lip, calloused pad to soft peach, and mustered up the strength to grin at her when her deep, pooling eyes opened.

"God," he said aloud this time, in a soft, rough voice, his thumb tracing up her lower lip to cradle in the gentle dip of her upper, "how do you do this to me?"  Her lips turned up, then, at this, and while on others it could have been catty it was innocent on her; Kira was closer to slumber than waking, her eyelashes drooping cherubically and her breath even with the drunk feeling of tired happiness.  "Jesus Christ," he thought to add, sighing noisily and, raising his lanky strong arms, hooked them about her.

He pulled her to his chest, her fuzzy pale strawberry hair soft under his chin as he hooked it over her head, tracing senseless patterns on her back.  His long frame engulfed hers, keeping the smaller, softer body that was her to him, and he wrinkled his nose at the steady feel of her breath on his collar.  

The faintest traces of fear were in his mind, then, as a sense of her mortality struck him sharply, with the steady in-and-out-and-in warmth that was her tender breath.  Without meaning to, without wanting to, he glanced at the shadows in their apartment, eyes dark in the night and watchful when he sought for monsters or men that might lurk therein, only half-remembering Masao who was both.  

It was not a fear for himself, but rather anger mixed in with fear, that the threats Masao had once leveled to Kira might be acted on.  A part of his mind reminded him that his worry was rather unfounded, as no one in their right mind could possibly let the bastard free after he had gashed Rei up significantly enough to nearly kill him.  The need to protect and defend his youthful wife – God, that part of his mind melted and burned at the same time, his wife!  His! – was powerful enough to momentarily overwhelm his rationality and give him reason to crush her closer to him.

"Rei," Kira asked, tentatively, lips moving over the curve where his collar gave way to his throat, "you're hurting me."  Startled and more than a little apologetic, he let go, trying to act the perfect gentleman as the damned voice in his head mused on ways to make it up to her, most of which involved the bed.  She rubbed daintily at her shoulder, a faint spot pressed into her still mildly flushed skin where his arm had suddenly tightened.  "Are you all right, Rei?" she asked, blinking owlishly.

"Yes," he said after a moment, carefully winding one of his fingers in her hair as means of distracting himself; there was a brief twitch of pain in his arm, along the muscle under the bright pink of a fresh scar where Masao's knife had caught and twisted jaggedly, and he closed his eyes in hopes of it leaving him.  "I'm fine," he continued.

"Are you sure?" she asked neutrally, her own finger moving forward to play around the dangerous area of his collar.  "I don't," her voice broke and hesitated, as though she was afraid of their quiet balance being snatched away.  Her finger traced the length of his collar, rubbing into the roundness of his shoulder, and then swooped slowly back, trembling along the line toward the semicircle curve of the collarbone's middle.  

"I don't want to, to be annoying, that is," she started again, her eyes fixing on the movement of her hand as he moved his palm into her hair, following the gnarling twist of his finger, "but I'm just worried that – you aren't okay.  I mean, after, after the hospital and Masao and," her voice caught and he closed his eyes again, a smile tugging at his lips; she screwed together her courage and mumbled, "after Sei, I mean, you know, maybe you're regretting that – well, what if it was your time to die after all?"  She gave him a helpless look.

Being a master of tact and a kind-hearted man deep inside, Rei burst out laughing; Kira immediately turned a completely different sort of red than that of a particular physical exertion, and she withdrew her hand from him, burying her face in the smoothness of her palms from her bewildered embarrassment.

"God, Kira, don't worry," he laughed, eyes narrowing with the force of his amusement, "I'm not going to kill myself 'cause I think I should've died."  He snorted at the thought, his inexplicable mirth still present in his features, and she woefully split her fingers to gaze painfully at him.  "I'm not laughing at you," he explained, using the hand woven in her hair to lever himself up, resting on his other elbow as he cupped his chin in his hand, "I'm laughing at the idea that I'm depressed as hell.

"I did," he adopted a teasing tone, the sort that she had forewarning to as being questionable in morals, "just have the most," a dangerous grin started forming on his lips and she made a soft sound of surprise, recognizing it, "damn gorgeous," he nuzzled her own collar, daring to kiss her nape as she blushed, shyly stroking the waterfall of his gold hair, "woman I have ever known – three times."  He looked up long enough to grin cheekily at her just so the full meaning of his words got through.

To his further delight, Kira was brave enough to somehow yank the pillow from under her head and bop him across the forehead with it.  "That's horrible!" and managing to find bold reserves she usually ignored, added, "Twice is more than enough!"  She stifled any following comments as his expression faded into a serious one.  "Rei?" she asked uncertainly and a corner of his mouth twitched tellingly.

"Kira," he said gravely, muscles firmly clamping in that corner to maintain his solemn gaze, "I am a man."  She smiled and opened her mouth, only to have her teasing comment cut short as he leaned up to kiss her softly, continuing unperturbed against her mouth, "As I was saying: I am a man.  I married you for a lot of reasons, one which was obviously because I like doing," he rolled his eyes meaningfully, "things with you.  And because I think I, y'know, maybe, sort of," he tossed in a doubting snort that served comically to enhance his words as he stressed the next, "_love _you, weird as that sounds.  

"And," he paused, a gentle look passing over his features as she giggled quietly at his minor speech, "because, most of all, I'm so scared if I can't have you near me every minute of the day I'll go out of my mind worrying that some bastard's going to – I don't even know."  The laughter died in her throat, replaced with a lump that made her feel both touched and saddened at the depth in his expression, and he added quietly, "I have to protect you, even if it kills me."

"Rei, if we're going to tell each other these things," she whispered in reply, voice drifting openly, touching the back of her hand to his face and smiling deeply at him.  "Sometimes," she confessed lowly, a faint blush gracing her face as he tilted his head to the side quizzically, "I stare at you, and it'll be these odd times, too, with my heart swelling and feeling as though I need to make you stop and paint you, make you last.  I think," she paused, continuing shyly, "I want to immortalize you, maybe.  But I'm rambling, anyway, and it's silly of me to say things like that, after you, you," she stammered, her voice dying down as her desire to be quiet overwhelmed her courage briefly.

"Well, you can make me last," he grinned in a purely masculine way, chin coming to rest in his hands as he gave her a sneakily cherubic look; her expression suggested she was leery of asking how, but he finished, punctually and cheerfully, "We can make a baby!"

Kira hit him with the pillow again, out of propriety and an ironically virginal-type horror at his coarseness, and he dramatically flung himself to the scant space of the other side of the bed, staring at the ceiling.

"See what she does to me?" he commented off-hand to the ceiling.  "I offer her the use of my body, like any good, decent love slave, and she rejects me.  That hurts," he added to her, before flopping on his stomach and burying his head in the mattress.  With the blanket swathed awkwardly around both their waists and his sudden movement, she was dragged more or less with him.

"Rei!" she protested futilely, the air nibbling at her arms and sending trails of goosebumps rising.  He muttered something into the mattress and she, relatively mortified to be half-naked in plain sight should anyone happen to kick the door down, tried to duck under the covers.  "You've taken all the sheets?  How am I supposed to sleep?"

He lifted his sunlight head, gave her an even look and a nasty eye-for-an-eye smile, and suggested sweetly, "Uncomfortably?" 

"Rei!" Kira cried, and his shoulders began to shake with his snorting laughter.  She grabbed at his shoulders, trying to force him over in spite of his superior muscle weight, and deciding this was not getting her anywhere fast, jabbed her fingers into the exposed skin along his lower back.  She wriggled her fingertips, hoping he would be ticklish, and was disappointed when his laughter took a mocking tone rather than hysterical.

"Oh, you can be such a jerk sometimes," she muttered, stubbornly continuing to tickle him as he wriggled his legs in a teasing manner.  "Aren't you ticklish anywhere?" she asked desperately, looking sadly through the curtain of her hair passing across her face.  He shook his head into the mattress and she continued to trail her hands up the smooth length of his back, digging in and trying to find any spot that would reveal his failing.  Despairing of ever getting vengeance, she sagged forth, dragging her knees out from the sheets and folding them under her as she flattened her palms to his back; fingers arching, she resumed trying to tickle him.

After a long, quiet moment she realized he had grown carefully still, hidden sheaths of muscles along his back tightening under her fingers, and her face began to flush again.  Still, she found no reason to stop the movements of her hands, instead straightening her fingers out and passing them over in feather-light caresses.  Muscles in his shoulders tensed, too, the honey joints no longer shaking with laughter but kept very motionless, as though he sensed he was hovering near some breaking point.

She could see, faintly, a small line on his back, tracing down from the circle of his armpit to a trickling end below his ribs, some remnant past of a motorcycle accident.  In her mind she could see, with alarming clarity, the welling of blood where Masao had pierced the knife through his flesh, and, as he had healed, the rising white, then pink, of scar tissue.  

"So many scars," she murmured, sadly, her palm hovering over the one trailing down his side.  "How many are because of me?" she asked rhetorically, to herself, and was thusly startled when he lifted his head – a little white from the strain of controlling himself, a little red with pleasure at seeing her bare form, and an expression of thoughtfulness in place.

"None," he remarked in a quiet tone.  "But, if," he hesitated, his face telling her he thought, maybe, she would not understand what he meant by the next bit, "if you'll have me, they're for you."  He offered her his peculiar smile, the one that made her heart quiver just so, and it fit the oddness of his gift, but she understood.

_All my pain I give to you, that with it you may do as you wish.  In my pain lies my past: my birth, my life, my death, and my love.  This is why I give it to you, that you may know the depth of my caring._

"But if you don't stop trying to seduce my back, you nasty evil woman," he continued in a blithe tone, eyes squeezing shut as he said cheerily, conversationally, "I'll have a new one where my brain's burst!"

She thought of hitting him with the pillow again, giving him more of the bantering jokes and frustration of her staving his attempts at touching and pleasuring again, but hesitated.  Why wait, she wondered, staring at him, eyes into eyes, soul into soul, her hand stilling on his back as she reached with its partner to brush his lips.

Masao was gone, now, at least for a while, and the spectre of Sei no longer loomed above them; perhaps they hadn't let Shiori hear word of their marriage yet, but that was a thing to worry about later or never at all, as she would learn somehow.  Rei had developed a friendship of sorts with the man he had known as father, a liking if not a loving, and she doubted he would ever fully love the man, no matter how he tried, but that was all right with her.  I have him here with me, she whispered to herself in her mind, at peace and saner than I have ever seen him.  We're whole.  Why wait?

"I don't think I'd like that," she agreed, leaning to him and kissing him, smiling and blushing at his ensuing snap at her mouth with his teeth.  "Rei," she protested weakly and he grinned sheepishly before she relented with a smile, offering herself to him.

And in the silence, in the dark, they were whole.

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End!

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Notes [II]: I cut out a few scenes I wanted to have in here, one where she does find a spot to tickle him and a scene at the end where she asks a favor about his motorcycle.  They really didn't fit in (the last one, notably) and so I decided to leave them out for the better.  I'll probably work them into my multiple chapter AU I'm working on…(Beckna-chan knows!  Beckna-chan knows!  *waves at best friend*  Love ya!)

Feedback: Highly welcomed.  I did put it a bit of emotional investment in this fic, so I'd really appreciate anything – compliments, criticism, flames, anything.  :]

Disclaimer: All of the characters and situations of Mars belong to Souryo Fuyumi and the various companies that can lay claim to publishing/translating it.  I merely dabble here and there with fanfiction.  Fic is mine, feel the joy.


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